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Sheikhs seem to hold the key to success in Iraq, but the US has put key tribal figures offside, writes Paul McGeough.

The country beyond Ramadi flattens out like a cracker biscuit. A six-lane desert highway stretches westward, all the way to Jordan. At times it crosses ribbons of green that sketch the route of irrigation canals; in other places it detours around scenes of battle-charred tanks and trucks, broken bridges and decapitated date palms.

Before the war, the four-wheel-drive would head north for a couple of miles, taking a sandy track over the railroad and away from "the big house". When it paused briefly at a junction on the Jordan highway, the tribal sheikh behind the wheel was taking his life into his hands. Literally.

When Malik Abdul Karim al-Kharbit turned left, he was going to Amman. It meant that as one of the more powerful tribal leaders in all of Iraq, he was putting his family and his business empire on the line. He was headed for the Jordanian capital, about 800 kilometres away, where he would betray Saddam Hussein in secret meetings with US intelligence agents.

Under the cover of social engagements with senior government officials and sometimes with the king of Jordan himself, Sheikh Malik delivered priceless information that had been fed to him by members of his Kharbit clan and by others at all levels of Saddam's military and security apparatus. An official who attended some of these debriefings was emphatic: "Malik was very much Washington's man in Iraq."

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Now Sheikh Malik is dead, but it wasn't Saddam Hussein who killed him - it was the Americans. In the avalanche of reporting that marked the collapse of Baghdad early in April 2003, little attention was paid to a statement from the US Central Command claiming the US had bombed the home of Barzan Ibrahim Hasan al-Tikriti, a half-brother to Saddam Hussein and former head of Iraqi intelligence. The attack was on April 11, two days after the demolition of the great Saddam statue in Baghdad. Reporters were told that six smart bombs had hammered into a house near Ramadi, in the centre of Iraq. There was speculation that Barzan was dead - that a joker had gone from the Americans' "most-wanted" deck of cards.

We are ashamed that it was the US . . . who toppled Saddam. We are Arabs and we have a custom that does not allow outsiders to kill our enemies.

But when US Central Command announced later that Barzan was alive and had just been captured in the capital, no questions were asked. Barzan did have a stake in a poultry farm west of Ramadi, which locals said had been bombed by the US on April 4, but he was not known to have a house nearby. The only American attack near the town, on April 11, was 13 kilometres further west, and the target was the big house, Sheikh Malik's family home. The result was an atrocity that in the roiling Iraq crisis went virtually unreported; 22 civilians died, mostly women and children, almost all of them Malik's immediate relatives. They died as six powerful explosions tore his home apart.

Iraqis rally against the US occupation.Picture:Reuters

It had been one of the most imposing homes in the region. When I was there, the sight of the sandwiched concrete slabs, once the floors, compelled me into the rubble. The shredded remains of a woman's gold embroidered blouse lay tangled in broken cinder-blocks; shattered ceramic tiles were littered among the foam stuffing ripped from a couch; there was a smiling Barbie doll in a yellow polka-dot dress, the heat of the blast fusing her blonde hair with the mangled plastic of an electrical fitting; and here were the children's charred school books.

I went to Ramadi towards the end of the Iraqi summer of 2003, seeking but not quite believing the story of Malik's death. But the recollections of a young man named Fahal Abdul Hamid, a nephew of the dead sheikh, made the events of a terrible night all too real: "It was 2am and the house was crowded - more than 50 people . . . Most of the men were in another building watching the war on satellite TV. There was a blast of light and a fog of dust; it was hard to breathe. I went towards the big house but not much of it was left. More than half of the victims were kids under the age of nine; Malik's six-month-old daughter was never found; his mother, his wife, his sister and four of his nieces died; I found my younger brother - dead. We thought we'd be safe because . . . we believed the Americans had to know where Malik was. We have houses in Jordan, Syria and Egypt. We could have gone anywhere but we chose to stay because the sheikh should be among his people when times are hard."

Months after the US strike, chaos still gripped the clan. The new sheikh, Malik's 33-year-old brother Hamad, had not yet come to terms with the death in the bombing of four of his daughters, all under the age of five, and the loss of his only son, aged two. For the time being, it had fallen to Sheikh Abdul Hamid, the father of Fahal, to hold things together by stepping in to act as leader of the Kharbit clan.

Malik, by all accounts, was a man of rare qualities. By tradition, the eldest son of a sheikh assumes the leadership on the death of his father, but Malik was handpicked as a child by his father ahead of his older brothers and groomed for leadership. Thirty-five years old when he died, he was a shrewd tribal chief and businessman.

Family members offered a litany of reasons for the sheikh's decision to become a US agent: the regime was frustrating his business plans; he was tired of the suffering of ordinary Iraqis after more than a decade of UN sanctions; most of all, he was tired of Saddam.

The symbolic heart of an Iraqi tribe is its mudhef. It is here that the sheikh holds his daily court, dispensing largesse and receiving troubled tribesmen, passers-by and visiting dignitaries. To enter what was once Sheikh Malik's mudhef is to step into another world, a parallel universe to the one in which the Bush Administration struggles to manipulate a Rubik's Cube of Sunni, Shiite and Kurdish elements, hoping to resolve them into a democratic whole. As the US focuses on its self-appointed task, around it, unseen, are the pillars of an ancient tribal society that, along with religious crossbeams of equal strength and proportions, are likely to doom the American quest. When I visited Malik's mudhef, a feast was produced even though I had arrived unannounced and it was the middle of the day. Fahal, the nephew of the dead sheikh, pointed to the steel doors, making what turned out to be a tribal declaration of survival: "This mudhef is always open."

It is still not clear how, let alone why, the Americans came to destroy one of their key sources of information about Saddam and his regime.

It seemed incredible to me that someone who had already been so useful to the Americans, and who could have been even more useful in advising them how best to gain some degree of acceptance in the most hostile territory in Iraq, could be killed without so much as an apology. Was it simply a colossal blunder? Perhaps. Yet Malik's death opens a window on to the American attempt to impose its version of democracy in a lonely place where it needs all the friends it can get.

Sheikh Abdul Hamid, the man who temporarily took over leadership of the tribe in the months after the attack, had his own theory about the bombing. He did not blame the Americans. His son, Fahal, a 29-year-old business studies graduate, translated a classic tale of power and envy in the desert: "There are people here who want us out of the equation because we are a strong family," he said. "Knowing that the Americans would bomb, they told them that Saddam was on our property. We know who they are, and we don't believe that the Americans are our enemies." The sheikh became too distressed to continue, and Fahal concluded his father's story. "At first we felt this huge, devastating rage. But dad is working to divert the anger - this family has not been targeted by the US, but by some of the local sheikhs who don't want us here. They are not of our clan but they are of our tribe. So we must prove that even though Malik and the others are dead, this mudhef is always open. The family is alive - we are still here and we are strong."

In the new Iraq, the US is caught in pincers of its own making, between the tribes and the mosque. The Americans thought that both of these powers could be ignored as they dreamily set about crafting a secular administration that would be dominated by the hand-picked exiles Washington had airlifted into the country as the dust of war settled.

They feared that if liberated Iraqis were left to their own devices, the mullahs would demand an Iranian-style theocracy and the tribesmen would emulate the Afghan warlords with whom the US was still wrestling further to the east. These assumptions denied many tribal leaders a seat at the table. The decision to exclude them has come at a huge cost.

Iraqis use the same word for the men who wield tribal and religious power - sheikh - and it is these leaders who are manipulating war and politics as the Americans dig themselves deeper into the mire. Much of the most violent resistance to the US occupation comes from the minority Sunni tribes of central Iraq, while with one critical exception, the religious leadership of the majority Shiite population, in the south, has resisted the temptation to resort to violence and instead fights with remarkable political skill to thwart US designs for their new government. The date, June 30, rapidly approaches when the US will return to Iraqis a highly qualified sovereign power over their country.

In Iraq and the Middle East, there are academics and experts in the service of governments - Arabic and American - who argue that the men in white robes have the power to scale back, if not to end, the bloody resistance that cripples the rebuilding of Iraq. Several analysts argue that the sheikhs' tolerance of the deadly attacks on the US, and their sheltering of the fugitive Saddam Hussein until his capture in December 2003, were a bid to win US recognition of their traditional leadership role in Iraqi society - and their role as keepers of the peace. They argue that it is the sheikhs, not the US forces, who will create a secure environment needed for the reconstruction of Iraq. It follows that if they are ignored, they have the power to wreck any US designs for Iraq.

The sheikhs deny all of this, with a wave of their white-cuffed hands. Nevertheless, a striking continuity in more than half a dozen interviews with tribal sheikhs across the Sunni triangle and the Shiite south - both self-proclaimed friends and foes of Washington - was the consistent refusal to condemn violence against the US forces in Iraq. In Malik's mudhef at Ramadi, Sheikh Abdul Hamid seemed to want to duck the issue altogether, when he told me: "I can't tell you what will happen with the resistance - you ask the Iraqi people." But then he complicated what might have been a straight answer to a simple question: "This is a trick question, because it suggests that we are behind the resistance." His protests sounded even more hollow when others revealed that on the previous day he had presided over a meeting of sheikhs to deal with a Turkish business delegation that wanted to bid for reconstruction contracts in the area. The Turks wanted the sheikhs' protection for their men and equipment. I was told: "They decided that if they allowed the Turks to come here, they would be seen to be working with the US and to be in favour of the occupation. So the sheikhs said no."

In Khalidiyah, west of Baghdad, it's a war of nerves. A crater three metres deep marks the explosion of a careering car-bomb that the local police knew was inevitable; and just across and down a highway that cuts through this small town between Ramadi and Fallujah was the home of a man the US suspected could help end these relentless attacks, a tribal sheikh by the name of Fanar al-Kharbit, a cousin of the deceased Sheikh Malik.

There is little doubt that as a tribal leader in the Sunni hotbed between Ramadi and Fallujah, Sheikh Fanar is a man who knows more than he lets on. The US had him figured as a source of "actionable intelligence", but they didn't have enough to pull him in. Tanks rumbled into his walled compound on the banks of the Euphrates River seven times in December 2003, soldiers tumbling out to rummage through his home. The sheikh is still full of hard talk, but those who know him said that at the time of the raids he was reduced to a shadow of his former self. Once one of the richest men in Iraq, he used to strut in crisp traditional dress and hobnob with the most senior elements of the regime; Saddam Hussein was a frequent guest at his table until a falling-out over business in the early '90s. When we first met a few months into the US occupation, however, he was ill-kempt and gaunt.

It is impossible to verify the seemingly fantastic stories told to me by this embittered man. However, Sheikh Fanar detailed the activities of his family in going abroad to meet US agents and spiriting CIA operatives into Iraq under the guise of visiting American businessmen. He also described a tribal plot to hijack eight Iraqi air force bombers for an attack on Saddam's palaces as a prelude to a coup only days before the US-led invasion on March 20, 2003.

Sheikh Fanar would not reveal the details of his cousin Malik's meetings with US agents in Jordan, but he said the two of them were part of a group of sheikhs who had concluded that Saddam was finished - yet they wanted Iraqis, not foreigners, to bring him down. The CIA had initiated the contact with Sheikh Malik and in 1998 and again in 2000 the family's business vehicles were used several times to ferry CIA agents from the Jordan-Iraq border to Baghdad for secret meetings with senior Iraqis, including vice-president Tariq Aziz, and the head of the secret service.

He described a series of frenetic meetings - in Fallujah, Baghdad, at the Habania air force base, near his home - as plans for the coup came together.

He said: "We had the pilots prepared - they would bomb the palaces and the TV station. When the US invasion started, we were still negotiating with some of the army generals to mount ground attacks on the palaces and to maintain law and order in Baghdad in the aftermath of our bombings. We had a special mobile radio station that was to keep the people informed but it all needed a few more weeks to make it happen."

Fanar and Malik were so confident in their belief that Saddam Hussein could be talked into surrendering that they made contact with the American units then advancing on Baghdad from the west. Fanar said that, "we asked the Americans for three days to allow us to change the regime. We received a message that they would give us the time but on the second of the three days the Americans entered Baghdad. Liars!"

But hadn't the Americans achieved their objective? Wasn't Saddam gone? Sheikh Fanar went to the nub of the issue for many Iraqis: "We are ashamed that it was the US, not Iraqis, who toppled Saddam. We are Arabs and we have a custom that does not allow outsiders to kill our enemies. This occupation is a cause for great shame for all Iraqis. The Americans did what Iraqis should have done and they are still here to remind us of it.

"In the first few months relations with the US were friendly but now they are trying to provoke me," Fanar told me in another meeting. He pointed to the charred remains of reed beds by the Euphrates that he had been ordered to burn so that he might be observed from US watch posts on a nearby bridge. "They are stupid, because they are listening to their spies who say bad things about me. I'm not a part of the resistance, but those who are are just protecting their country. This is not liberation, it is an occupation. People are very tired after Saddam's three wars. I'm worried if the Americans keep attacking me that my tribe will react, but for now I have told my people not to cause trouble." It was difficult to gauge the truth of Fanar's insistence that he was not a part of the resistance. I had concluded that he was.

Fanar refuses to name the sheikh he believes shopped him and his family to the Americans, but around the time of Saddam's capture he told associates of his own campaign of low-level retaliation. He had sent the sheikh in question a gift of a black abaya, the unflattering head-to-toe garment worn by conservative Iraqi women, along with several lipsticks. When I last visited Fanar al-Kharbit at his home at Khalidiyah in the autumn of 2003, he seemed prepared to keep punching.

"I've told the Americans to get out of my neighbourhood. They wouldn't be here if I was a leader of the mujahideen . . . and if they keep going like this a lot more US soldiers will die."

The last I heard of Sheikh Fanar was this April, when Salam, the translator who accompanied me to the sheikh's home, reported that he had seen Fanar on the Arab news service, al-Jazeera. He had been speaking on behalf of the fighters at Fallujah.

This was proof indeed of a great loss to the American occupation forces.

Here was a man whose tribe and family had actively worked with the US against Saddam, who had risked their lives for Washington's Iraq agenda, but who in our last meeting had told me that he was duty-bound to seek revenge for the death of his cousin.

This is an edited extract from Quarterly Essay: "Mission Impossible: The Sheikhs, the US and the Future of Iraq", available from June 19. (Black Inc, $13.95).